Should I plug it in or not?

I provide technical support for a local office for a resort company on the East Coast . I manage the five servers, network printers, switches and approximately 50 end user computers. I have been in this position now for about 98 days and though I am not anywhere near in Maytag Repairman mode I have come a long way towards that goal.

Just recently during my daily routine I was reminded of something that we take for granted. That thing is electricity and how much electricity we really have available to us. In an office setting whether it be in a hard walled office or a cubicle you will find an electrical outlet or two. You will also find that people like to install power strips and surge protectors into the receptacle and you will also find that people like to daisy chain a bunch of those power strips together in order to maximize how much stuff they can plug in.

Most of the time when you plug stuff in the electricity is there and everything magically works. Just as soon as the circuit is over loaded the breaker will engage and all electricity to that circuit will cease to exist. I was reminded of that the other day when a space heater was plugged in and did just that . Shortly after the power outtage occurred and the breaker was flipped back on I got a phone call because some of the computers were not getting onto the network properly. Computers and electronic gizmos in general are very dependent on electricity to perform and they are very sensitive to fluctuations in power or in this case power being terminated suddenly.

The moral of this story is this. Just because you have an available electrical outlet to plug into does not mean that the circuit your outlet is on will not overload when you plug that gizmo in. Talk to someone that is in the know such as the maintenance department or your systems administrator and see what they think. Taking the extra time to be safe will keep others from being inconvenienced when the power goes down unexpectedly not to mention the possible data loss when the computers go down suddenly.

The other thing I want to stress about space heaters is this. Space heaters can be dangrous and we need to be extra careful where we leave them plugged in and not to leave them running when we are not near them. All it takes is one spark and all of that paper in your office immediately becomes tender for a fire.